This startup aims to reduce healthcare professional burnout with a machine learning tool

When healthcare employees are overworked, they’re likely to leave — and that can be a serious problem for the health system.

Hiring is expensive. Workplaces with high turnover rates tend to have less employee satisfaction, but when employers ask their employees if they’re satisfied, they don’t always get straightforward answers that show what the risk of burnout really is.

To address these issues, startup founders Tiffany Chan and Sisi Hu, an engineer and a postdoc labor economist who met doing climate change work at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, cofounded Atalan, a mission-oriented company with a platform that uses machine learning to help healthcare systems identify workplace risk factors that drive healthcare professionals to leave, in 2022.

Chan had come to the US from Hong Kong for college and Hu had completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in the UK. During the height of the COVID pandemic, the two saw friends and family members in healthcare suffer from burnout. They realized that, much like with climate change, the way things are going with healthcare in the US is unsustainable.

Around this time, Hu received a National Science Foundation grant to study COVID’s impact on healthcare workers, which led to the two focusing on healthcare sustainability, and the launch of the startup.

“A lot of our approach at Atalan is taken from the climate change risk mitigation world to the healthcare world,” Chan told Technical.ly. 

“People think that burnout is because you’re not resilient enough,” Chan said. “It’s not fair and it’s not true. Most burnout is because you were overworking.”

A tool that utilizes the electronic health record system

Atalan’s software, which is used by fewer than ten healthcare system clients, taps into passively collected data via the electronic health record system (EHR). 

“So for instance, our doctors and nurses in health systems touch a computer at every point in their workflow,” said Chan. “All the passive and collected data shows how long they’re working in a given day, how many patients they have and how complex the cases are.” 

Also tracked in the EHR are the number of messages healthcare professionals are getting from patients, and if they bring electronic chart work home.

When burnout risk is found, Atalan recommends workplace solutions — and it goes beyond yoga and pizza parties.

Using the data, it looks deeper to find out why, Chan said. 

“If they’re spending a lot of time on the EHR, documenting and charting at night and bringing work back home, is it because their EHR is not optimized for them, are they not using the right template?” Chan said. “Is it because they probably need a bit more training because they weren’t probably onboarded on it?”

There are about 100 risk factors, she said, and for each of them, Atalan recommends some kind of workplace environmental change or policy changes. 

While the company is just three years old, Atalan’s machine learning-driven method has been shown to be effective and has led to concrete changes in some healthcare systems.

The metrics, Chan said, can detect the impact when a health system client rolls out a new solution — one client, for example, embedded pharmacists in primary care clinics to alleviate the workload of their primary care doctors.

“We detected that these doctors’ turnover risk dropped,” Chan said. “They’re spending less time on the EHR and more time with their patients without affecting their patient access, or the number of patients they see, which is great.” 

Healthcare changes for good

To get where they are, Chan and Hu started out by not paying themselves as the startup got off the ground. Early on, they partnered with a small health system, which gave them funding to hire a few people to help with the work of testing the feasibility of the platform.

“We validated that it is feasible, and then we raised our first round, just among friends and family,” Chan said. “And then a year after that, we started getting clients signing contracts. That’s when I raised my first seed round, two years ago.”

According to PitchBook, Atalan has raised $3.54 million, with a post valuation of $6.48 million.

Chan and Hu also sit on the research and development committee of the Coalition for Physician Well-Being, a health system coalition representing about 50 systems. 

The goal, Chan said, is to have the tool be available for health systems, while also having enough data to support nonprofits and national associations to make needed changes. 

Healthcare is facing a squeeze in the next few years, she noted, as systems face increasing policy pressure. 

“It’s not helping doctors and nurses stay in this industry at all,” Chan said. “This is a for-profit organization, but we want to be supporting good changes in the industry.”